Chac

A chac looks like a lean jaguar. It usually prowls on all fours but can rise and walk upright, when it closely resembles a werejaguar. Tears run endlessly down its face, not from grief but as a sign of its bond with water. Each chac is tied to a color set by its home region: blue in the north, black in the east, red in the south, yellow in the west and green in the central lands. Its eyes show that hue, and so does its mist in gaseous form, so a southern chac has red eyes and a reddish vapor.

Chacs fight only when threatened and unable to escape, and even then rely on magic. A chac casts spells as a 5th-level priest of the rain god, but only water spells drawn from the elemental sphere. It can also use weather summoning once per week and take gaseous form, as the potion, four times per day.

From caves high in the mountains, chacs send rain across the land below, and they would far rather tend the weather than hurt anyone. Although all of them cast like the rain god's priests, only half actually serve that deity. Those that do lean toward evil, and some share lairs with rain dragons. Gifts of food appease most chacs, but the evil ones, particularly those living alongside rain dragons, often demand a sacrifice.

Groups are families: a male, a female and one or two young of either sex. Mates merge their essences while in mist form, and a cub arrives a year later, greeted by every chac nearby with a tremendous rainstorm. Young stay with their parents until maturing at about five, and adults may pass 100 years. When one dies, its neighbors mourn with a drought of 1-4 weeks, sometimes longer or worsened by rain dragons.

Chacs shun intelligent humanoids, because their legends are full of kin seized and hurt for failing to make rain on demand. Should one be taken and the others learn who did it, they pool their power to flood or parch the culprits until the captive goes free and the offenders atone.

Water is a chac's chief nourishment, supplemented by meat and cocoa beans. Every lair holds 100-1000 beans, brewed into a chocolate drink the creature loves, along with collected art, mostly carved jade and turquoise rather than metal, worth 200-800 gold in all.

Chacs have no natural enemies and get along with most neighbors, though now and then a rain dragon kills one for the water in its body, and humans who find one may try to capture it to command the rains. Chac skin is a component in potions of gaseous form or sweetwater, and the claws serve in some forms of thorn magic.